Does ThingWorx OPC DA client support scripting capabilities?

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
February 2, 2017
7 replies
3849 views

It would be great to do some processing on the Edge end.

Connectivity

Best answer by CarlesColl

No it doesn't, some questions:

It's for a new project or an existing one?
What kind of scripting are you trying to do?
You can put your hands on OPC-DA Server?

Carles.

C

CarlesColl

Answer

1-Visitor

No it doesn't, some questions:

It's for a new project or an existing one?
What kind of scripting are you trying to do?
You can put your hands on OPC-DA Server?

Carles.

M

Michail

Author

1-Visitor

Thank you Carles for confirming this.

This is for existing project. Since we are interfacing with automation systems a lot of tags and alarms are involved. Scripting capability would help to handle large amount of tags, namely by allowing to encode information.

For example, instead of separately addressing 2000+ Boolean properties (each property corresponding to an alarm/trip condition) I could potentially encode them as a 32 bit integer and decode afterwards in the composer; dynamically create alerts, etc.

This is what I'm actually doing with Siemens S7-300/400 systems and it is relatively easy to implement since I can directly access memory location of a data block.

With Allen Bradley (RSLinx) however is different story, alias names are used for individual tags. With scripting capability I would've hoped to choose which tags to encode (text file for the reference perhaps) and send corresponding integer value. Ideally I'd like to send alarm name, definition and real time stamp.

This is just one example. Machines I'm dealing with are from different eras, the same tag could be scaled differently, different tag name can be used for the same parameter, etc. Having such flexibility would help to unify machines under fewer templates, relieve the platform from unnecessary processing, etc.

C

CarlesColl

1-Visitor

I think there's an easy answer for this: Kepware . With the latest version of Kepware and the corresponding plugins you can do what you said ( getting ride of the OPC-DA agent, which will be discontinued on the near future on favor of Kepware ).

C

CarlesColl

1-Visitor

Yup, but by the way if you are building a solution for 2000+ boolean values and a lot more things that shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, I'm actually discussing with them about Kepware pricing ( as actually it's a PTC product and the Industrial Connectivity solution for ThingWorx ) and also on cases like you ( and us ) where we just need an OPC-DA client to overpass actual TW OPC-DA client limitations ( which it's "free" ) how licences would work on that cases.

But if you need to script on the edge, then for sure you will have to pay at least for Advanced Tags Plugin which it's about 2k$.